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180713788
comment
byshilly
026 @04:27AM
(#65962166)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
My god, you really didn't read the very article you posted, did you? Once again:
"Undoubtedly, fast charge is an exciting innovation. Capability is up to 2000kW. This compact system is powered by three of our 70kWh lithium-ion phosphate battery rafts. Each has the capacity to store 84kWh. Accordingly, 504kWh is available for use by the train’s four AC traction motors. The system incorporates two battery racks on each driving vehicle. Only two vehicles are in use at any time. The third is a spare"
LFP, not NMC.
180713776
comment
byshilly
026 @04:26AM
(#65962162)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
What's the cheap way to do overhead electrification in the UK context? Is there some magic that doesn't require you to rebuild bridges etc? If you think engineers haven't already exploited gapping, you're wrong, but it's not a magic bullet and brings its own set of problems such as managing pantograph arcing.
180713754
comment
byshilly
026 @04:24AM
(#65962154)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
Please for the love of god do some research before farting this kind of rubbish out into the world.
Electrification is wildly expensive in the UK context, because we have Victorian rail infrastructure that cannot accommodate the wires, transformers, etc, without major rebuilding of tens of thousands of structures, such as stone bridges. It costs £8m *per mile*.
180713744
comment
byshilly
026 @04:21AM
(#65962150)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
Third rail is dangerous and expensive on long overground routes.
180713742
comment
byshilly
026 @04:20AM
(#65962146)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
Did you not read the article you posted to?! It literally says the following:
"Undoubtedly, fast charge is an exciting innovation. Capability is up to 2000kW. This compact system is powered by three of our 70kWh lithium-ion phosphate battery rafts. Each has the capacity to store 84kWh. Accordingly, 504kWh is available for use by the train’s four AC traction motors. The system incorporates two battery racks on each driving vehicle. Only two vehicles are in use at any time. The third is a spare."
Lithium-ion phosphate is LFP, not NMC.
180713718
comment
byshilly
026 @04:15AM
(#65962142)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
Well, blow me down with a feather, I would never have known that opex isn't fully predictable had it not been for your piercing insight. And as for the revelation that *staff*, actual humans, will be required for *actual servicing*, I mean my god, you have upended years of dogma and what we thought we knew about railway engineering with a single mighty blow. Truly, you are some colossal titan of intellectual vigour. Except for the bit where you think railway staff cannot be trained to service these trains, of course. That was a little bit of a tell on your part.
Meantime, in the real world, the data we have about traction batteries has indeed shown that opex has not been what was predicted, because SoH degradation has been *lower* than originally estimated, and that was for consumer-grade applications in cars, where the engineering is lower quality and drivers spend less effort managing battery life than an railway operator will.
180709380
comment
byshilly
2026 @11:31AM
(#65960974)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
How is this better than just recharging the batteries?
180708692
comment
byshilly
2026 @07:22AM
(#65960688)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
British trains do not have a caboose. If the second car held the batteries, then swapping that car out would require decoupling two cars, moving both ends of the train (with no traction power from the battery), moving in the replacement battery car, and re-coupling. That would take far too long for a passenger rail service
180707666
comment
byshilly
2026 @03:47AM
(#65960622)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
Just to give a rough sense, for a 100 mile intercity route, it would cost about £900m in capex to electrify in the UK (£8m per mile plus power supply upgrades etc at £100m). Deploying the BEV technology would cost about £40m in capex (8 trains at £3m per, 3 charge sites at £2m per, grid strengthening at £10m). BEV opex is mainly battery replacement, figure £24m; electrification opex is OLE and equipment, figure £200m. So it’s like 10% of the costs.
Electrification is justified where traffic density is high (4+ tph) or expected to be high, or where there’s lots of freight, high speeds, or long gaps between stations. That said, the UK has a terrible track record of failing to electrify, and personally, I’d rather see BEV passenger trains roll out now where they can, than wait for some putative full electrification that may well never happen
180707304
comment
byshilly
2026 @02:47AM
(#65960558)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
The UK has a Victorian rail infrastructure that operates extremely intensively in a tightly constrained landscape, full of buried utilities, low overhead bridges made of stone that would need to be completely rebuilt, and lacking space at the side of the routes for transformers etc. Electrification costs a fortune, £8m per route mile. Third rail is dangerous and poorly suited to the unelectrified remaining UK routes, which are mainly intercity / freight and relatively lengthy, and it needs 750V DC, which needs way more current than 25kV AC.
180707236
comment
byshilly
2026 @02:37AM
(#65960554)
Attached to: UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
This is for heavy rail, not light rail. Light rail, including underground, is already electrified, at least in the UK.
180687920
comment
byshilly
2026 @12:04PM
(#65956914)
Attached to: Fully Electric Vehicle Sales In EU Overtake Petrol For First Time In December
I think you’re being a bit pedantic on some points:
- Of course there were mass market EVs around before the Zoe, but from today’s perspective, 2013 is reasonably close to the start of the EV mass market. It’s 13 long years ago, which is a lot further away than the Zoe’s launch was from the Leaf’s launch
- While there are plenty of EVs that haven’t offered heat pumps, my point wasn’t that every EV offered them, just that there have pretty much always been models that have
- 40 min 20 to 80 isn’t *that* far off 30 min 15 to 80. Obviously the latter is better, but c’mon, it’s not a million miles away. I’m not trying to deny that charging speeds have improved, of course they have, and lots, and it’s fabulous. But there’ve always been cars around that have recharged in something not far off half an hour on a road trip. I’ve done road trips for the last decade, and I know 20 is much better than 40, but honestly for either 20 or 40, I’m timing my stop to coincide with a meal and relaxing!
And I disagree on range. Sure, I don’t want to drive for more than 2 hours without a break, but I also sometimes want to drive 200 miles to a place, do something, and drive 200 miles back without having to find a charger at the destination or stop for a break en route. And larger batteries mean much greater battery durability. Early Zoes will see degradation driven primarily by cycles, but last gen Zoes and later EVs will see mainly calendar degradation, potentially extending the working life of cars by a decade when combined with the benefit of fewer moving parts, and thus leading to substantially lower churn in the fleet and lower carbon costs
Finally, I think I’m right and you’re wrong about SSB and range, MG4 notwithstanding. The notorious Donut solid state battery is *absolutely* promising greater energy density: 400Wh/kg! Not delivered yet, of course, and quite possibly never will be. But you said no-one’s promising it, and they for sure are, and solid state is absolutely a method of delivering higher energy densities. The Mercedes EQS SSB prototype doubled the range of the standard EQS, and this was attributed to the SSB. This is a fundamental part of the SSB offer!
180687692
comment
byshilly
2026 @11:46AM
(#65956836)
Attached to: Fully Electric Vehicle Sales In EU Overtake Petrol For First Time In December
It’s not particularly accurate from AI. It will be a bit exhausting to get into all the detail, but for example the devolved institutions are recognised as legislatures of constituent nations with competence over culturally foundational areas such as language, culture and identity policy, reflecting national-status recognition that US states do not constitutionally enjoy. For example, Wales imposing statutory Welsh-language duties across public life.
More broadly, the differences between life in, say, Scotland and England are much more striking than the differences between life in, say, Arizona and Maine.
180684980
comment
byshilly
2026 @05:22AM
(#65956200)
Attached to: Fully Electric Vehicle Sales In EU Overtake Petrol For First Time In December
Peak was 2019, 15.9m. 2025 was 13.3m. The US peaked in 2016 at 17.5m, 2025 was 16.2m. I think the data for both places for both are far too messy to support the PP’s contention that Europeans can somehow not afford to buy new cars (by implication compared with Americans).
180684924
comment
byshilly
2026 @05:07AM
(#65956184)
Attached to: Fully Electric Vehicle Sales In EU Overtake Petrol For First Time In December
I think you have to consider the counter-factual: a world without Tesla. I reckon in the end it had only a mildly accelerative effect, if any, because the Chinese were already committed to the transition at the time Tesla started, and they built the stack, top to bottom. They would have been providing the same push to European OEMs that they are providing right now. There was a time when it could have been very different, but that would have required Tesla to go with the Model 2, not waste time on the boondoggle of the Cyberbeast, make the Semi a reality, and do a lot more with the existing models.
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